skill categories and situational skills

[TuernRedvenom]

Seeing that in LRB 5 picking the right skills is crucial I wrote this up because, well, I have nothing better to do at work atm. All positive or vicious comments welcome, of course. Note that it's mainly intended to help not-so-experienced coaches think a bit about skill selection and team development.

This is an attempt to categorise and analyse the most important skills in the game. I will also try to show how these categories can help you pick skills for your team. It will be totally and utterly useless for experienced coaches but maybe new players can get some use out of this.

Note that many skills don't perfectly fit into 1 single category.

the categories:
*Offensive: offensive skills are skills that help you score touchdowns when in possession of (or when it is loose and you could gain it) the ball. Most ball handling skills will fall in this category.
*Defensive: defensive skills are skills that will help you to regain the ball.y
*Positional: positional skills are skills that can improve or enforce your players position on the field. The can be used both on offence as on defence and whether possessing the ball or not is irrelevant.
*Protective: protective skills are skills that decrease the chances of your players getting hurt
*Destructive: destructive skills are skills that help your player to hurt the opposition players

Finally I will discuss what situational means and its effect on skill picks.

Offensive:
Diving Catch, Pass, Hail Mary Pass, Accurate, Strong Arm, Safe Throw, Sure Hands, Big Hand, Kickoff Return, Extra Arms and Dump Off

Defensive:
Pass Block, Strip Ball, Disturbing Presence and Kick

Offensive/Defensive:
Catch and Nerves of Steel

Positional:
Leap, Shadow, Guard, Grab, Stand Firm, Side Step, Diving Tackle, Tentacles, Prehensive Tail, Sprint, Sure Feet, Very Long Legs and Two Heads

Protective:
Thick Skull and Foul Appearance

Destructive:
Mighty Blow, Piling On, Dauntless, Multiple Block and Claw

Protective + Positional:
Fend, Wrestle and Dodge

Destructive + Positional:
Frenzy, Juggernaut and Tackle

Destructive + Protective + Positional
Block


Categories and team development

From this categorisation I can conclude that Block is the most usefull skill for most players since it combines many uses.
But how can you use these categorisation for skill picks. Easiest way is looking at your team stats. If you have trouble scoring you probably should invest more skills in the offensive category. Or if you are suffering a lot of Casualties then picking skills in the protective department might help. The positional skills should be your backbone to build your offensive/defensive/destructive/protective game style upon. Positional skills should be the bread and butter in every team since they are usefull both when attacking as defending. A lot of the positional skills get even better when taken in large amounts.
Offensive skills however are usually reserved for specialist players with exceptional stat lines or skill access, like catchers or throwers. A common mistake, especially in elf teams, is to take too many offensive skills as they are highly situational (see later). For most teams it is easier to score then to defend and a lot of teams have positionals that start out with offensive skills as default. Building a good thrower never hurt anyone though, the problem is usually badly skilled (overkill) catcher types.

Situational skills

A skill is highly situational when it requires many pre-requisites to be usefull.
A very clear example:
Safe Throw is a highly situational skill. The prerequisites are:
1) player making a pass action, for which he needs to have the ball and also note that a team can only make 1 pass action per turn
2) a player of the opposing team can intercept the pass and does not have Very Long Legs
3) the player making the pass succeeds in his agilty roll
This means that this is a higly situational skill, but that doesn't make it useless since an interception is often game deciding. It means you shouldn't take the skill in spades or just on anyone. It will be usefull on a designated thrower.

Another highly situational skill is Strip Ball:
1) the player must be in a postion to hit the opposing ball carrier
2) the opposing ball carrier should not have the "Sure Hands" skill
3) you must roll a "Pushback" result on the block dice
Very situational but when it works it is often game deciding. Taking this skill on a wardancer is a good idea as the harshest prerequisite here is 1, and the Wardancer has Leap, Dodge, high MA and high AG to work around that. Taking this skill on eg a skeleton is a bad idea as it probably won't be able to throw a block on the ball carrier very often (if ever...).

In short, highly situational skills should only be taken in very limited numbers on specialist players and you should always ask yourself "How many times in a game could this skill be usefull to me, and what would be its impact if it works?" This will depend very much on the team you are playing yourself (while Kick Off Return is not very situational for Wood Elves its impact is also minimal, for Dwarves it's impact can be huge) and what other teams are present in the league (taking Tackle in all-Dwarf or an all-Amazon league is a huge difference).
Other highly situational skills:
Hail Mary Pass, Nerves of Steel, Dump Off, Dauntless, Shadow, Tentacles, Big Hand,...

[stormmaster1]

nice post. Quite useful for anyone with skill selection difficulties. The positional skills are some of the best, and they tend to be of 2 sorts: inhibit the opposition, and promote position of you own team (e.g. diving tackle is the former and dodge). I'd suggest that guard is less of a positional skill, more of a protective/destructive depending which side is blocking.

[juggler434]

Thanks for the post, a lot of people in my league will find it very useful

[TuernRedvenom]

The positional skills are some of the best, and they tend to be of 2 sorts: inhibit the opposition, and promote position of you own team (e.g. diving tackle is the former and dodge). I'd suggest that guard is less of a positional skill, more of a protective/destructive depending which side is blocking.

You're right on the first comment but where do you put shadow then?
You're also right about guard.

[stormmaster1]

i'd put shadow in both: you inhibit the opposition via multiple dodge rolls, and keep your player ontop of the chicken livered git running away. It's mainly inhibiting the opposition though.